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The last time I interviewed Viggo Mortensen, we got thrown out of a bar. That was more than a decade ago, when he was promoting a mediocre movie and I was writing for a mediocre magazine. Viggo got on the wrong side of an aging bartender (the only other person in the Sunset Boulevard joint) by asking if he could turn down the volume on the soap opera blaring from a TV in the corner. The guy flipped out, told us to leave, and threatened to call the cops. Since I lived a block away from the bar, we got a couple of beers from my refrigerator and finished the interview on my front porch.
Now he’s promoting a good movie, “The Road,” an adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s devastating novel about a father and son trudging through the remains of a world that has been almost destroyed by an unnamed cataclysm. And this time he’s in the hunt for a best actor Oscar nomination, after a stretch of terrific work that has found him following the commercial breakthrough of the “Lord of the Rings” movies not by taking parts in potential blockbusters, but by doing some of his best work in small, serious films, such as “A History of Violence” and “Eastern Promises.”
Well, I wanted it to be somewhat neutral, mostly out of respect for Cormac McCarthy. They wanted to do even more voiceover, which I didn’t think was necessary. And they wanted to do variations on what he wrote, and I thought, no, let’s just use exactly what’s in the book. There’s so much emotion. Sometimes it’s subtle, sometimes it bubbles to the surface, but it’s always there. There’s lot of tension, and you can hear that in our voices.
